Movie Player settings - interaction or performance?

primaldivine

HI Team Izzy,

I am having issues (I filed a report) with crashing background Movie Players causing black frame dropouts when they restart.
Is there a list of compatible settings for the various codecs? I am sure there used to be a list but I cant find it, and am in a bit of a rush!
In next two hours I am hoping to cross check the following file types as to whether they are best set to 'interaction' or 'performance'?

HAP, Hap-A, Hap-Q (Yes,I do have the HAP plugin installed)

Apple Pro Res

H264 (I know I shouldn't use this, but if time is critical and the file is H264...?

This is the info from Isadora Manual 2, but is it still current for v2.6.1?

AVFoundation: Apple Pro Res (all flavors), H264, MP4, Photo JPEG, DV NTSC/PAL
DirectShow: AVI and WMV movies.
QuickTime: There are many, but Photo JPEG, DV NTSC/PAL, HAP, and Animation are probably the most important. (Apple's complete list can be found here.) QuickTime also supports H264 and MP4, but playback is very inefficient when compared to AVFoundation.

If anyone has time to throw me their thoughts (with or without an explanation! LOL) I would be very appeciative!

Cheers, Jamie

Juriaan

Hi there,

The main question is do you use your content for an Interaction piece (So a lot of stopping / playing back / going forward. (Scribble basically) or are you just trying to play a movie in a loop ?)

Juriaan

If you are going for a piece where you need to use interaction. Since you stop the movie a lot or play the movie in revers I would personally go for the QuickTime codec. (So .mov) in this case..
If you just need a movie that plays on repeat go for HAP

mark_m

@juriaan said:

If you just need a movie that plays on repeat go for HAP

Hmmm, I disagree about this :-)

Hi Jamie,

If the file doesn't need interaction - ie you're just playing it straight through - my personal opinion is that H264 as .mp4 is just fine. For these kind of files it's my codec of choice. I generate mine from Adobe Media Encoder using the adaptive high bitrate setting.

For interactive stuff, yes, HAP, but ProRes should work fine too: fundamentally you need a codec that just uses I frames, no P frames or B frames, 'cause decompression and playback is really only meant to go one way! Forwards!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Hope all good with you in the frozen north! London is wet and Brexity.

Woland

@primaldivine

Try going Isadora > Preferences > Video > Background Movie Players and unchecking the little box. Does that make a difference?